Richard Fernandez
Richard Fernandez, who used to write under the pseudonym "Wretchard the Cat," has an intriguing post on nihilism titled "The Seven Gambit" -- a post I became aware of via my maverick friend Bill Vallicella -- and Fernandez writes:
Nihilism isn't the absence of a belief. It is something subtly different: it is the belief in nothing. The most powerful weapon of terrorism is therefore the unyielding No. "No I will not give up. No I will not tell the truth. No I will not play fair. No I will not spare children. No I will not stop even if you surrender to me; I will not cease even if you give me everything you have, up to and including your children's lives. Nothing short of destroying me absolutely can make me stop. And therefore I will defeat you even if you kill me. Because I will make you pay the price in guilt for annihilating me." (italics mine)Fernandez applies this analysis to militant Islamism, which -- I suppose he infers -- extrapolates from Allah as Absolute Will to Allah as Nihilistic Force, and perhaps that's the case, implicitly, though I doubt that even Islamists carry this point to its full nihilistic conclusion since they do have a political aim, the establishment of a Caliphate to dominate the world and enforce Islamic law.
But that nihilistic point accounts for a lot since militant Islamists seem capable of any atrocity in the name of Allah, as if Allah's hands were unbound by any moral principles . . .
Dear Mr. Hodges,
ReplyDeleteI have been an avid reader of Mr. Fernandez for many years. He is both insightful and wide ranging in his writings. The comments on his site are consistently the best I have found on the web.
Regards,
Roy
He is indeed insightful, and he has a life-history of varied experiences to draw upon for illustrating his points.
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
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Frightening stuff.
ReplyDeleteYeah, God as absolute will, ungrounded in a moral nature.
ReplyDeleteJeffery Hodges
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